Neurotica (6 page)

C
harlie was following the service from the English text which
appeared on each opposite page of the prayer book. Anna stood
next to him wondering what he looked like naked. She made no
attempt to join in the prayers, partly because she was feeling far
too sexually aroused to concentrate, and partly because she
couldn't read Hebrew.

As a child she had constantly and successfully skipped Sunday-morning religion classes. While most of her Jewish friends
had their heads down learning the Hebrew alphabet, Anna could be
found sitting in the Wimpy bar stuffing her face with chips, or
wandering aimlessly round the local park with her co-skipper Melanie
Lukover.

Fearing that people, meaning her mother, might notice if
she carried on gazing adoringly at Charlie, Anna turned towards
Rabbi Hirsch. He was probably no more than thirty, but with his
scholarly pallor and shiny greenish-gray suit, as well as his huge
wiry beard which gave the impression that God had stuck the
minister's pubic hair on to the wrong end, looked much older. Anna
wondered if she might interest the
Jewish Chronicle
in a
feature on rabbi makeovers. She was trying hard, but having little
luck, to imagine him after a few sessions on a sunbed and a trip to
a decent barber, not to mention an introduction to an electric
nose-hair trimmer. It was then, from about two feet behind her,
that there came the distinct trill of a mobile phone.

On the third ring, Anna, who seemed to be the only person who
could hear the phone, swung round to see Bunny Wiener, Aunty
Millie's other grandson (the dumb one who had, surprisingly, made
a fortune in ladies' separates, as opposed to the one who became a
West End accountant), fiddling with his prayer shawl in an attempt
to get his hand inside his jacket pocket. Bunny was the only man
wearing a prayer shawl, apparently the one male mourner who didn't
know that they weren't required at a shiva by any known religious
authority or cultural tradition. As if this weren't drawing
sufficient attention, Bunny, his hand now in his pocket, was also
struggling to remove his mobile, which appeared to have become
wedged in by a huge bunch of keys and his wallet. The phone carried
on ringing .   .   . five, six, seven, eight rings now.
As Bunny dropped the bunch of keys, which landed with a clunk on the
floor, Anna shot him a
for-Christ's-sake-get-out-can't-you-see-we're-trying-to-mourn-here
look. Bunny, who wore his stupidity with the
same kind of pride as his handful of gold signet rings and
metallic-turquoise Roller, simply ignored Anna's filthy glance,
although he did make one feeble attempt at invisibility. As he began
speaking into the mouthpiece he moved to the back of the room and
pulled one-half of his prayer shawl over his head, as if he were
a bird about to go to sleep under its wing. From this position,
looking, Anna thought, like some overgrown ultra-Orthodox sparrow,
Bunny began to have a row at only slightly less than normal row
volume with a person she took to be one of his wholesale
suppliers.

“Monty,” he said—although because Bunny suffered from
some kind of chronic adenoid condition this came out as Bonty.

“You're a jerk, that's what you are, a jerk. What do you
mean, you're sending me eight gross in a size eighteen? Yesterday
teatime I spoke to Bildred in the office and she confirmed eighteen
gross in a size eight. .   .   . Go on then, you jerk, go and
fetch the bleedin' order form then. I'll hold.   .   .   .”

While Bunny held, the hubbub of the badly choreographed
prayers continued like an anarchic Greek chorus. Then, after a
couple of minutes, Monty obviously returned with the order form and
Bunny started shouting and getting really angry with the poor chap.
Anna could hear him bashing his fist on the wall, but mostly he
just carried on calling him a jerk.

F
rom what Anna could make out, the barney was finally resolved by what appeared to be an unequivocal climb-down from Monty.
This was followed appropriately by a stream of uncoordinated final
amens from the mourners.

G
loria ran into the kitchen where two of the borrowed kettles and a stainless-steel urn had come to the boil
simultaneously, and Anna turned to Charlie and said in a perfectly
calm and casual voice that it had been great meeting him, but it
really was time she was getting back to her brats.

As she began looking round the room trying to work out where
she had left her handbag, Anna was aware that she felt a bit sick
and that she could feel her heart beating so fast she suspected she
was having one of those tachycardia attacks Dan seemed to get every
other week, which usually ended up with her calling an ambulance at
three in the morning and him in casualty wired up to a heart monitor
for hours on end, only to be told there was nothing wrong with his
heart and that he had been having a panic attack.

Anna knew that she too was panicking. Only hers was the sort
that would only go away when Charlie Kaplan confirmed that he
fancied her as much as she fancied him and that they weren't about
to say good-bye forever in Uncle Henry's shabby, smelly lounge.

After all, they had spent the last hour or so deep in
conversation, maintaining the kind of lengthy eye contact people
make when they are attracted to each other. You didn't, Anna
thought, have to be Desmond Morris to work out that this behavior
was the equivalent of a couple of dating gorillas showing each other
that red patch on their bums.

She tried to stretch out the hunt for her bag, which she'd
actually spotted immediately, for as long as she could. This, she
thought, would give him sufficient time to take her to one side
and suggest that, as he was going to be in London for a week or so
visiting all his newly discovered aunts and cousins, they might have
lunch together.

But he didn't. As Anna picked up her handbag from underneath
the drinks cart, she saw that Charlie was now over the other side
of the room talking animatedly to Bunny Wiener. With a lump in
her throat the size of a honeydew melon, Anna went over to them.
She glared at Bunny and then extended her hand formally towards
Charlie Kaplan, repeating how much she had enjoyed meeting
him.

C H A P T E R     F I V E

R
ODGERS AND HAMSTERSTEIN SAT on the pine kitchen table
transfixed as Anna belted out “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” while
doing a rising trot round the kitchen and at the same time gripping
imaginary reins with one hand and holding Amy's old pram sun canopy
over her head with the other.

After a minute or two she segued into “I'm Just a Girl Who
Cain't Say No.” Twirling the sun canopy over her shoulder like a
parasol, she skipped over to the cupboard under the sink and took out
a new bag of fluffy white hamster bedding.

Whenever Anna cleaned out the kids' hamster cages—which
wasn't very often, as she usually got Denise to do it—she
always felt it was somehow appropriate to familiarize them with all
those daft the-corn-is-as-high-as-an-elephant's-eye lyrics written
by their Hollywood songwriter namesakes.

But there was more to Anna's tone-deaf outburst this morning
than a tutorial on mediocre melodies for two rodents who were
unlikely ever to hold a tune. The precise reason for all the singing,
the gallivanting around the kitchen and the performing of unnecessary
domestic tasks was that last night, just as Anna was walking away
despondently from Uncle Henry's house, Charlie Kaplan had finally
got round to asking if he could see her again. Her impromptu musical
celebration, which had begun as soon as Dan and the children left
the house at eight o'clock, opened with her leaning on the breakfast
bar, pushing an imaginary Stetson to the back of her head and
launching into “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

Anna was feeling a lightening of her spirits which she hadn't
known since a particularly significant Sunday night at a Jewish
youth club disco in Edgware when she was fourteen. That night Anna
had her first ever French kiss, with a zit-encrusted boy named
Stewart Levinson, who smelled of TCP and didn't seem to know how
to arrange his teeth when he kissed her. Against all the odds,
however, she found herself rather enjoying the experience. At the
same moment, her crush on Jane Hickling, who was a prefect in the
Upper Sixth, ended; Anna realized that her prayers had been answered,
and that God had finally decided she didn't have to be a lesbian
after all. Now, more than twenty years later, the Lord had answered another
prayer and decided to let Anna sleep with Charlie Kaplan.

After she had shaken hands with Charlie at the end of the
prayers for Uncle Henry, Anna knew she had to get out of the house
and into her car as fast as she could, because she wasn't sure how
much longer she could stop herself from blubbing. She was in no
mood for another of Aunty Millie's hairy-lipped kisses, so she waved
a quick good-bye to her from across the room. Then she poked her
head round the kitchen door and did the same to Gloria, who barely
acknowledged her since she was giving Murraine a telling-off for
pouring out tea without using a strainer. A moment later Anna was
walking down Uncle Henry's garden path. As she turned round to close
the little wrought-iron front gate, she could see Charlie was behind
her, obviously trying to catch up with her.

“Come on,” he said. “I'll walk you to your car.”

She felt the melon in her throat disappear in an instant and
once again hope began to spring internal throughout her nether
regions.

As they walked to the car, Anna could sense Charlie's unease
and that he was trying to get up the confidence to ask her something.
For a second, she thought she might have to take the upper hand by
suggesting they meet up in town one day next week. But she couldn't
bring herself to do it. Although in her head she was Gloria Steinem
and Germaine Greer rolled into one, in her heart she was the sort
of unreconstructed eighteenth-century heroine who dashed around
Catherine Cookson novels in a hooped skirt, coyly dropping lace
handkerchiefs at the feet of Heathcliff look-alikes. She desperately
wanted Charlie to take the lead and make the first move. Finally,
after a few more moments' hesitation, he did.

“Listen, Anna, I've really enjoyed your company today. It
seems a shame to say good-bye. I thought you might like to have
lunch next week. .   .   . Perhaps Tuesday?”

Anna immediately blurted out, “Yes, great, Tuesday would be
brilliant,” so nervously and overeffusively that she must have come
across like some lust-sick teenager finding herself face-to-face with
Liam Gallagher in Boots. But Charlie appeared not to notice. He
was too busy giving her another one of his long, sexy looks. Anna
felt that if her nipples got any harder or larger they would, in the
next few seconds, burst through her bra cups like a pair of horny
Scud missiles.

Gently Charlie took her arm and Anna allowed him to lead her
a couple of yards down the road so that they were away from the
orange streetlamp and couldn't be seen from Uncle Henry's house.
Then, very slowly, with his hands holding the sides of her
shoulders, he began to bring his face towards hers. His lips had come
to within a fraction of a millimeter of touching Anna's when
suddenly there was an almighty shriek from Uncle Henry's front
garden.

Anna and Charlie sprang away from each other to put a
respectable distance between themselves, and then stood watching the
commotion as people came tearing out of the house. From what they
could make out, Aunty Millie, who had probably been following
Bunny Wiener to his Roller in order to get a lift home, had tripped
on a loose piece of crazy paving and fallen over. She was lying on
her back in one of the flowerbeds, screaming at everybody to phone
for an ambulance to get her to Stoke Mandeville as she was paralyzed
from the waist down. Even goofy Bunny was able to point out that
paralyzed people tend not to be able to wave their legs in the air,
and offered her a glass of cherry brandy, which one of the lady
helpers from down the road had placed in his hand. Aunty Millie
knocked it back and said she thought she could manage another, at
which point she began clutching her chest, and proclaimed so loudly
that she could be heard as far away as Chadwell Heath the onset of
a cardiac arrest.

“Look,” Charlie said to Anna, “I'd better go and see if I
can help calm the old biddy down. You get going and I'll see you
Tuesday—one o'clock if that's OK. Let's meet at the hotel.
I'm staying at the Park Royal in Kensington.”

At the very mention of the word “hotel,” Anna almost fell
into a Victorian swoon and thought she too could do with a swig
of cherry brandy.

Fighting the vapors, she took a deep breath and made an effort
to appear composed. She said that would be fine and that she was
looking forward to it, but Charlie, who was obviously finding it
hard to forsake her in favor of Aunty Millie's hysterics, stayed to
watch her as she walked round to the driver's door and got into her
car. She had just started the engine when he mimed to her to wind
down the window.

“By the way, I almost forgot. I found this on the floor in
the hall. At first I thought it might be one of Aunty Millie's sex
toys, then I realized it could only be yours.”

Grinning lasciviously, Charlie passed Anna her Tobago brooch,
the carved wooden one of the Rasta with the huge erection. It must
have fallen off her jacket somehow when she arrived at Uncle
Henry's.

“He's certainly a big fella. Reminds me a bit of m'self.”

Anna wasn't sure whether she was about to have an instant bowel
movement due to her embarrassment that Charlie had found the brooch,
or whether she was feeling even more turned on—if that were
possible—by his reference, albeit joking, but then again,
maybe not, to the size of his own undercarriage.

There was one thing, though, about which Anna had no further
doubts: so long as a state of national emergency wasn't declared
between now and next Tuesday lunchtime, and provided the Queen
didn't phone her on Monday night to say that she was prepared to
give Anna the exclusive on her royal romps with Des O'Connor, she
and Charlie Kaplan were going to sleep together.

O
n the journey home Anna experienced nothing but glorious
sexual anticipation and almost frightened herself by the lack of
guilt she was feeling, now that she was on the point of cheating
on Dan. She realized that she hadn't discussed him with Charlie,
other than to mention him fleetingly. She was certain, nevertheless,
that when Gloria cornered him at the cemetery, she would have filled
him in on everything about her, from the irregularities of her
teenage menstrual cycle to her blissfully happy marriage.

What Anna couldn't work out was why, since Charlie must know
she was married, he hadn't made some reference to Dan, if only to
check that he wasn't a karate black belt or a professional
assassin.

She suspected it was nothing more than sheer embarrassment.
What had she expected him to say? “I really want to sleep with
you. By the way I'd love to hear all about your husband. For
instance, has he ever taken a piss sitting down, and where does he
stand on the debate about whether those logos on men's polo shirts
are tacky.”

Anna did, nevertheless, have some misgivings about Charlie
Kaplan. It struck her that he might well be one of those men who
only had affairs with married women and preferably ones who had
children. They, no doubt, fell madly in love with him, were
desperate to run away with him and were probably on the phone to
him several times a day, “just to hear your voice,” no matter what
continent or time zone he was in. She suspected that he, on the
other hand, always bargained on them never having the courage to
leave their husband's Amex Gold card, or risk losing their
children. This left the charmingly alliterative Captain Kaplan free
to fly round the world screwing a different married woman at every
stopover, without having to give the remotest thought to offering
them anything approaching a long-term emotional commitment.

Still, she realized, she shouldn't really give a stuff what
his motivation was for wanting to get her into the sack. If she was
a true believer in the gospel according to Rachel Stern, who might
yet, if Anna's plan to commit serial adultery succeeded, become St.
Rachel, she had to have faith—and keep reminding herself that
for a truly clitoris-centered woman, it was the sex and not a
bloke's psyche that mattered.

O
ver the weekend, Anna had conjured up
umpteen sexual
fantasies about Charlie Kaplan. She'd invented her favorite in the
communal changing room at the local swimming pool, where she and the
children were getting dressed after their usual Sunday-morning
splash-around.

While Josh and Amy fought about whose undershirt was whose,
Anna had sat on the wooden bench, pretending to concentrate on
rubbing her towel over a particularly stubborn bit of hard skin on
the underside of her big toe. What she was really doing was clocking
the other women's naked bodies. It wasn't that, in her late
thirties, Anna was having fresh doubts about her sexual inclination;
it was simply that, as somebody with a rotten body image, she liked,
needed even, to play “I spy a woman in worse shape than me.” A
pelican neck and the kind of tits which could be tucked into the
waistband of a pair of panties could set Anna up for a week. Pert
turned-up breasts on a mother of four would, on the other hand, have
Anna wanting to dive into one of the private changing cubicles to
phone the Samaritans on her mobile.

This had been a good morning. In a couple of minutes she had
spotted a set of hairy nipples, the kind of flabby underarms from
which you could make a set of curtains and have enough left over
for tie-backs, as well as a severe case of pubic alopecia.

Slowly, Anna continued to dry herself off. Previous thoughts
of having to sneak her ill-fitting skin in through the emergency
entrance of some swanky beauty salon before her Tuesday-lunchtime
assignation began to recede for the time being, at least. What took
their place was a kinky daydream about her, Charlie Kaplan and
a length of silk cord.

This involved him making her lie down naked on a bed, turning
her onto her stomach and tying her hands behind her back. In her
dream, he then forced her to wear a black leather slave collar and
led her into the shower, where he covered her whole body in some
sensational body foam from Harvey Nicks. Then, while he insisted
she stood absolutely still, he gently stroked her clitoris, while
using a razor in the other hand to shave off all her pubic hair.
By now, with Anna in a state of some frenzy, he made her lie down
on the cold, hard bathroom floor tiles, spread her legs open and then
came deep inside her with an erection the size of a zebra's.

B
ut sitting at her desk on Monday morning, she thought that,
knowing her luck, the reality would be that Charlie Kaplan suffered
from some daft neurosis or other, such as a morbid fear of French
onion sellers, and couldn't make love until he'd checked there
wasn't one hiding under the bed, or secreted in the chest of drawers.
Or he would turn out to have an erection the size of Rodgers and
Hamsterstein's.

T
his latest foray into Charlie Kaplan's putative psychological
underbelly was interrupted by the phone ringing. It
was the familiar gorblimey voice of the
Globe on Sunday
's
features editor, Campbell McKee. Campbell had actually studied
politics at Oxford, and been the
Observer
's social
services correspondent for several years before moving to the
Globe
for double the salary and a company Mercedes 190.
Desperately anxious that nobody there should think of him as
an intellectual middle-class wuss, he affected an almost immediate
personality change. The refined chap who used to wear shrunken
threadbare Guernseys to work and was the author of the well-received
Dial and Dialectic,
a Marxist analysis of the role of the
telephone answering machine in late-twentieth-century culture, ran
over his vowels one night with a lawn roller and took himself to a
cheap flashy jeweler in Romford to buy a gold signet ring for every
finger. These days he had all the manner and charm of a bent East
End boxing promoter. By rights Anna should have despised Campbell;
most people who knew about his hypocrisy did. Anna, however,
thought he represented a perfect paradigm of human frailty and
rather liked him for it.